The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

Recent analysis reveals that residents of several southern states had to wait disproportionately longer to vote in the 2012 Presidential election than people from other areas. Black and Hispanic voters, Democrats and Independents, and those living in cities were three other groups that had longer waits than their counterparts (whites, Republicans, non-urban dwellers). As reported in The New York Times, long waiting times depressed turnoutin states like Florida, where residents waited an average of forty-five minutes to cast their votes. "[M]ore than 200,000 voters in Florida 'gave up in frustration,'" according to an Orlando Sentinel report. Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia also faced long lines at the polls, and a New York Times graph reveals that seven of the eight states with the longest waiting times are in the southeast.

Emory University's Digital Scholarship Commons is excited to invite proposals for presentations at the First Annual Atlanta Studies Symposium. The day-long symposium will be held on April 26, 2013 in Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library.

The symposium will convene an interdisciplinary meeting of scholars and community activists concerned with issues related to Atlanta. We are also eager to highlight the the wealth of resources available at area libraries and museums, and to enhance connections between scholars, institutions, and libraries.

Some potential themes for presentation topics include (but are not limited to):

Population and Place

Metropolitan Ecologies

Transportation

Education

Proposals for papers, talks, or round-table discussions should be no more than 400 words. Proposals on any aspect of Atlanta are welcome, but priority will be given to papers that relate in some way to the themes listed above. Preference will also be given to proposals for fully constituted panels. Cover letters for panels should indicate the theme and identify the panel's participants. We are eager to make this event as engaging as possible and encourage presentations that represent work-in-progress that would benefit from open conversation. Please include audio-video requirements in your proposal.

As part of the "Appalachia Rising: Voices from the Mountains" conference held in September 2010, protesters participated in a day of action in the nation's capital to increase awareness of mountaintop removal mining (MTR) and its impact on Appalachian communities. Described as both a mobilizing effort and an opportunity for civil disobedience, the protest resulted in over one hundred arrests during a sit-in on Freedom Plaza. While mountaintop removal is often considered an Appalachian problem, this protest and its depiction of the federal Army Corps of Engineers points to the complexity of environmental issues that transcend regional boundaries.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

On January 21, 2013, the day of President Barack Obama's second inauguration, the Virginia state Senate rushed a bill to re-draw district maps in the state's 40 senatorial districts while Virginia state Senator and civil rights attorney Henry L. Marsh III was in Washington, D.C. attending the presidential inauguration. Because the state Senate is evenly split 20–20 between Democrats and Republicans, Marsh's absence allowed Republicans to pass the measure with a 20-19 majority. Marsh called the move "shameful." In a statement released on January 22, Republican Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling, who would have cast the tie-breaking vote if Marsh had been present, held "grave concerns" about the proposed redistricting plan, and stated that he did not support the move. Even though members of the Washington Post Editorial Board condemned the move as "a bald-faced power grab" and Republican Governor Bob McDonnell opined that "I certainly don't think that's a good way to do business," supporters of the redrawn district map contend that it corrects Democratic gerrymandering put in place in 2011 and creates a new majority-minority district in order to "enhance Virginia's compliance with the Voting Rights Act."

State-level redistricting plans enacted in Alabama, Texas, and Florida since the 2010 US Census are also being contested. Next month, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, which challenges "whether Congress’ decision in 2006 to reauthorize Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act under the pre-existing coverage formula of Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act exceeded its authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and thus violated the Tenth Amendment and Article IV of the United States Constitution." The case involves the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed suit on behalf of the Alabama State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and four Shelby County voters in order to defend Section 5, which requires jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to have changes to their voting laws "precleared" by the federal government to protect voting access of racial and language minorities. A similar case declaring Section 5 unconstitutional was filed in Texas, where a controversial Republican-authored redistricting plan was denied preclearance in 2011; the case is unlikely to be heard by the high court until the Holder decision later this year. More information on that case can be found at the Texas Redistricting and Election Law Blog. Finally, even though the state legislature, state Supreme Court, and the US Department of Justice all approved Florida's 2012 redistricting plans, Florida's Second Judicial Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis issued an order which denied a motion to dismiss a challenge to those plans on January 17, 2013. The plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters of Florida, argue that the plans gerrymander districts across the state "in favor of Republican interests." They will get a chance to argue the case in court later this year.

1823 Seneca Quarry workmen payroll. 1823 payroll. National Archives & Records Administration, Records Group 42: Records of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, 1790–1992. The ARC Identifier is 3025595, MLR Number A1 18.

Congratulations are in order for Professor Mark Auslander for publishing his well researched and excellent article, "Enslaved Labor and Building the Smithsonian." I've been researching and writing a broad history of Seneca quarry over the past year, a book called The Smithsonian Castle and The Seneca Quarry, which the History Press will publish in February 2013 in time for Black History Month. Prof. Auslander and I each independently came to a very similar conclusion about the likelihood of slaves working at the quarry during the construction of the Smithsonian Castle. While overt evidence confirming that slave labor was used (such as a contract between a slave owner and a contractor to lease slaves) hasn't surfaced, the evidence points in that direction.

I might add that slaves almost certainly did work at the Seneca quarry on an earlier project in 1823, either for the US Capitol Rotunda archways and doors, or the White House porticoes, or both. We know this from a federal payroll found in the National Archives. The project lasted four months (April, May, June, July), and at its peak in May employed seventy workers at the quarry. Out of those seventy workers, thirty-one signed for their pay with an "X," which was then countersigned by the paymaster, Arch. Lee, as they were illiterate. It was illegal to educate slaves, so some (or even many) of these people may have been slaves. An additional three workers were noted as "Boy," meaning a slave servant. And thirteen workers were noted only by their first names—names like Rezin, Salsbury, Hall, Nace, Ishmael, Luke, Frank and Martin—a common practice for slaves. Someone signed for these thirteen people, as none of them "marked" the payroll. It could well be that their owners collected their pay and signed for them.

1823 payroll. National Archives & Records Administration, Records Group 42: Records of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, 1790–1992. The ARC Identifier is 3025595, MLR Number A1 18.

The most remarkable part of the 1823 payroll is the annotation by Frank and Martin (see image, lines 31 and 32). Whoever signed for their pay signed their names as "Negro Martin" and "Negro Frank." These men were almost certainly slaves. Adding these two together with the three "Boys," you have at least five slaves working on the project—and possibly many more. In fact, a majority of workers for this project may have been slaves.1

In all of my research, the 1823 federal payroll from Seneca quarry was the only quarry payroll I uncovered (and I looked through a lot of archives); this was of course four decades before the Castle construction. Sadly there are no quarry company records, and most of the early Castle records were burned up in a disastrous fire at the Smithsonian in January 1865. Like assembling a puzzle that's missing a few pieces, we can see the overall picture of Seneca quarry, even while some crucial elements may be forever lost.

The quarry at the time of the 1823 federal payroll was owned by Thomas Peter, the father of John P. C. Peter. He transferred the property to John around 1828, and John began building Montevideo, a Tudor Place in miniature a mile from the quarry. It was John P. C. Peter who won the bid to supply redstone for the Smithsonian Castle.

Seneca quarry closed during the Civil War; it lay right along the C&O Canal, which was frequently targeted by Confederates. In 1866, John P. C. Peter's son Thomas sold the quarry and adjacent farm to the Seneca Sandstone Company. The new owners mismanaged the company, significantly undercapitalizing it by selling stock to senior Republican leaders at half-price (including Ulysses S. Grant), then took out several mortgages that they couldn't pay back. The quarry's bankruptcy in 1876 helped bring down the Freedman's Bank, wiping out the savings of some 400,000 freed slaves and exacerbating poverty among African Americans for decades. This early example of Gilded Age crony capitalism has the whiff of Enron, WorldCom, and the recent housing bubble all wrapped into one.

Remarkably, the Seneca quarry reopened in 1883. It went bankrupt again in 1890, reopened, then closed for good in 1901. We know that many former slaves worked at the quarry after the Civil War from newspaper advertisements, personal accounts, and above all a treasure trove of photos uncovered during my research that shows the quarry in action—almost all of them showing black workers. The history of Seneca quarry is inextricably linked to African American history.

1. National Archives & Records Administration, Records Group 42: Records of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, 1790–1992. The ARC Identifier is 3025595, MLR Number A1 18.

The Bulletin compiles news from in and around the US South. We hope these posts will provide space for lively discussion and debate regarding issues of importance to those living in and intellectually engaging with the US South.

Jake Adam York served faithfully on the Southern Spaces editorial board. His insight, enthusiasm, and generosity will be missed.

Jake Adam York was a poet of great vision and a deeply humane intelligence. His work to chart the history of his native South and the civil rights movement—its violence and erasures—represents a brave reclamation and reckoning: a reclamation rooted in the absolute necessity to articulate, in the elegant language of poetry, a fuller version of our American story. Beyond the sheer beauty and technical skill of his poems is a profound intervention into our ongoing conversations about race and social justice. His body of work represents a bold and necessary challenge to our historical amnesia, making him one of our most indispensable American poets.